In case you missed the story, Richards set off a firestorm after tweeting a photo of two guys who offended her with inappropriate sexual jokes during a tech conference.

She faced a flood of nasty messages, including this one, on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other sites. Boulder-based SendGrid subsequently fired Richards, who worked as a developer evangelist for the startup.

“We, the tech community, should be taking a hard look at our response to the aforementioned events,” Ohanian starts off a blog post titled Dear Fellow Geeks: WTF. “Aren’t we better than this? I’m not talking about the trolls. There will always be frenzied agitators who are just mashing away on their keyboard, trying to outrage people. I’m talking about how many (otherwise reasonable-seeming) people I saw who were comfortable and self-righteous in calling a woman (derogatory names) from their Twitter, Hacker News, or, yes, reddit account.”

He urges them to stop and hopes to use the incident “to reflect on how we use these tools to foster the tech community.”

“Plenty of us got used to being ignored. Many of us were bullied. But what did we learn from it — empathy or hate?” Ohanian wrote. “We need to know the answer, because suddenly we are the cool kids.”

Other than the following tweet, Richards hasn’t commented publicly since she was fired Thursday.

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